'Power' does not explain

In a special issue of the Journal of International Relations and Development, edited by Adam Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami, several scholars have come together to assess causality in world politics. It resulted from an author workshop in Reading in June 2014 and a panel at BISA Dublin 2014. The special issue includes contributions by the editors, as well as Alexander Betts & Angela Pilath, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Milja Kurki, Heikki Patomäki. It is so far accessible as First Online.

Stefano Guzzini's article is on 'Power and cause'. He argues that conceiving power relations as a subset of causal relations can be used to expose the problems of a certain behaviouralist take on causality and develop an interpretivist approach to explanation. The first section of this article shows that a behaviouralist approach ultimately clashes with a relational understanding of power, since the latter requires endogenising values and understandings in an analysis in which several causal paths to the same outcome can exist (equifinality) with radically different implications for attributing power. Power relations can be non-linear, and power dispositional or latent, as well as not translating into influence.

The second section draws the consequences of these contradictions by conceptualising causal/social mechanisms for and in an interpretivist framework. Such mechanisms can be part of a wider analysis of contingent processes that answer ‘how possible’ questions. Although interpretivist process-tracing provides explanations without strict regularity, such processes include mechanisms which are transferable to other cases, hence generalisable. Finally, the article establishes a specific discursive mechanism of crisis reduction in foreign policy identity discourses, as developed in the comparative study of the processes that make us understand the unexpected return of geopolitical thought in Europe in the 1990s.